I am trying to understand why I am so healthy?

A couple of days ago I had a medical office visit and had a professional equipment blood-pressure test. I got a score of 120/68. That is approximately what I always get, but my question is why do I get such good scores on this primary indicator of general health, while the average American male aged 76 scores much worse. Oh sure I chose my parents and grandparents carefully and they lived, on average into their late 80s, but I am in markedly better condition that all six of them were when they were my age.

I am of average height and weight and just about as average in every way as it is possible to be, and my New Year’s resolution many years ago was to be extraordinarily ordinary. That is, to be uncommonly common. Perhaps most people would consider me to be a total failure on that score, and would consider me to be extraordinarily boring and annoyingly common. I do make attempts to be interesting, but for me that tends to move into the abstractions of generalized problem solving a little too easily, and away from discussing other peoples personal problems, which is what most people appear to be more interested in. People seem to be more interested in themselves than any thing else. I just don’t understand.

When I do have some personal problems, such as physical health, or mental health problems I try and discover their rood causes and then to create solutions for those problems which will have a universal applicability. Therefore, it may seem to others that I am overly concerned with my own problems, and I do have more unnecessary anxiety than most people, but there is a difference, I get deep into the my problems and then try to find solutions to those problems and publish those solutions onto the internet so that anyone can find them with a google search. To make things findable requires a touch of audacity in the way things are titled and developed, because a perfectly scientifically bland statement with all of the required definitions and subtle provisos will be near impossible to find with a standard search. Even now it seems most of my good ideas have been buried in a mountain of irrelevant repetitive commercially driven rubbish that has no verified, in a personal reproducible way, information, just generalized blah blah.

What I consider my most important ideas never even reach the computer generated top ten list on my personal page. The EarthArk Project, with over a hundred posts, is the easiest thing humanity could be doing to preserve its long term well being, but it is never read. What may be what gave me good health was carefully observing my bodies reactions to things and making intentional corrections to problems. My discoveries: the easiest, cheapest and most life preserving thing an individual human can do to prolong their lives I have had published 22 years ago, it is to chew up an aspirin at the very first sigh of any physical malfunction, and it is all but unread. The Probaway Pain Scale has been out there for years and the Probaway Maturity Scale for Decades, and those are extremely easy to understand and are useful for orienting your mind and body to reality, but they also are all but unread.

Perhaps the Unabomber was right, as are the news people — If it bleeds it leads, but what doesn’t is ignored.

American health and contentment ratings by state

Tags

Contentment, Divorce, happiness, Health, Impoversihment, IQ by state, Theft by state

American health and contentment ratings compared to IQ and poverty - Click pix

This chart came from the internet and there is no way to know the accuracy of its conclusions, but it appears well done and properly documented. My posts of the previous few days have been about the noticeable atmosphere of contentment here in Bend, Oregon. On the chart above Oregon rates as an 18 of 50 on contentment which is better than the national average. Of course the majority of Oregon’s population live west of the Cascades mountains in Portland and the other larger cities, and it may be that the eastern sides ratings, and Bend, might be more accurately compared to the northern mountain states, Bend is only two percent of Oregon’s population – Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada, North & South Dakota and Wyoming. All of these states rate as very good on the contentment scores.

But what is contentment when compared to happiness and pleasure? It is difficult to know how those terms were defined on the cart above, so they could be measured on a statewide level, but from some travel experience these do seem to match my personal feelings. So for discussion I will accept them.

Beginning from my perspective on the Probaway Happiness Scale, published in 2005 these terms were defined as — Happiness is a belief that a hoped-for state of affairs is coming into existence. Pleasure is limited to the positive feelings of the moment. Contentment is the feeling that a hoped for state actually exists. The Happiness Scale lists 15 levels of happiness based on philosophical schools, whose primary end goal of happiness was arranged on the chart by time extension. It goes from instantaneousness survival in the moment through daily life situations up to religious gurus creating methods for social improvement of everyone. Each of these types of happiness would have a corresponding form of pleasure and contentment.

For example a basic middle value of Happiness of Epicureanism HAPS~6 — Pleasure in acquiring and possessing good things and it would have the momentary pleasure of consuming the item or the longer term contentment of observing and enjoying the item as fulfilling an expansive goal in a sustained way.  A higher level value of Happiness, that of Utilitarianism HAPS~12 — Guiding the groups large and difficult task to a positive result, would have the pleasure of observing these people performing and the contentment of seeing a large socially valued task through to its completed state.

The condition of contentment in the chart above probably was based on a very low-level of measured value, about the level of Happiness of Eroticism HAPS~2 — Consuming of vital foods and activities which tend to promote a physical well-being. This makes sense because the other measured values, like theft, divorce, impoverishment are at a low-level of social wellbeing, perhaps even HAPS~0 Surviving from some life threatening stressor. Contentment at these low levels is very close to simple instantaneous pleasure. It appears that the higher on the Happiness Scale one is living at the moment the more extensive is their concept of contentment both in time and space.

If this approach is correct then those places which rate highest on health, the absence of disease, and also on contentment the satisfaction of things being appropriate the way they presently exist, should have low crime rates, less impoverishment and low divorce rates. The chart seems to present that fact clearly, although it is an observation made after the data has been collected, and may have been biased in the presentation.

Perhaps the most comfortable places to live in the United States would be found by moving to a quite locality in one of the states ranking best in health and contentment. That would be – Utah, Hawaii, Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland, Washington … I began these thoughts based in Central Oregon which I think is better ranked with the mountain states, and my observations here is that people are remarkably friendly and apparently contented with their situation. This is a little strange because the local job economy for the last five years has been poor, but there are no signs of desperation. The lowest levels of contentment requires the economy to be good but even the higher levels require the basics of survival to adequate before stability can be appreciated.

Contentment is had when you intentionally accept what are immersed within.

How to prevent a healthy man from fainting.

Tags

Fainting, Needle phobia, Prevent fainting, Trypanophobia

When I was a freshman in college, and in control of my own destiny, it became apparent to me that I should have a dentist look at my seriously infected lower front tooth. It had given me trouble for years, ever since my friend intentionally kicked me in the face when we were playing football. I know it was intentional because, just a few seconds before, he said he was going to kick my teeth out. There were some vicious kids in my neighborhood, and I remember walking past this particular one’s house one day and hearing him scream bloody murder as his dad was beating him, who knows why. He was a grade above me so he was noticeably bigger than me. Anyway, he kicked me in the face, my tooth died and got abscessed, and I struggle with it a little to this day.

It would have been about six years later that I was seeing my new dentist, yet again about this infected tooth. There were so many problems with my teeth that it took three visits to deal with them all, and by the third visit my dentist had taken a liking to me and was doing his best to convert me into a fledgling dentist. In his effort to convince me how wonderful dentistry could be and to help generate my interest in the field, he had given me a hand-mirror so I could watch all the needle insertions, drilling away rotten tooth decay, scraping away too soft tooth material, and all the rest of it. I must admit it was interesting, and especially since it was my mouth, my teeth and my pain.

Dentistry in Spokane back in 1953 must have been a thriving business, because there was no natural fluoride in the water, and almost everyone had lots of cavities. The city fathers had refused to put fluoride in the public water supply, because it would weaken people’s bodies, and make us all susceptible to the communist menace. It was stupid thinking, unsupported by any facts, but people have not improved any since then and we still refuse to face simple facts, their obvious implications and conclusions. People only change their behavior when compelled by absolute necessity.

Now comes the most interesting operation of all, drilling out the rotten bone and abscessed gunk from beneath the bottom of the tooth. Remember, I’m watching all this in my mirror. First, the dentist makes two cuts into my gum. Then pulls down the flap of skin exposing the tooth to its roots and beyond. Fascinating! Then he grinds away at the rotten bone while blood leaks out and gets suctioned away. Very fascinating! Strange scorched vapors, different from the drilling of rotten tooth vapors, drift the short distance to my nose. I reminisce on the strangeness of it all, start to feel dizzy, nausea wells up, the rubber dam in my mouth prevents me from breathing, my stomach muscles tighten and I feel I’m about to vomit. The doctor says to relax, things are going well, as he crushes a small ampoule of ammonia near my nose. The odor overwhelms my senses and I bounce back to mundane reality.

The doctor said I fainted, but I don’t know if I really did, because I don’t remember any missing time.

Last week, fifty-eight years after that overly interesting visit to the dentist, I was at the VA hospital having some blood drawn. The nurse was very friendly, and we were having a playful round of vibrant repartee, while she was cinching me up, preparing the needle, bottles, labels and other paraphernalia.  During those intervening years I have had countless needles poked into me without fainting, but I must admit the possibility always enters my mind and makes me queasy, and the nurse was aware of my concern as I watched my precious bodily fluids being drained away. My blood looks surprisingly dark even in the tiny tubes.

The nurse says relax, it will all be over in a minute, and I start to relax. The old familiar feeling of being about to faint comes over me as I relax, but instead of relaxing as told to do, I tighten up my abdominal muscles for a second, release and tighten them up again and release at about a one-per-second rate. After five seconds I feel just fine again. All jet pilots learn this technique the first day of flight school because when pulling a few g’s your blood runs out of your head and to prevent this you push it back up with stomach pressure. So here is the point of this whole story — the medical profession is still recommending precisely the wrong thing to do when a patient starts to faint.

Last night I researched the problem, and it’s sometimes called vasovagal syncope, or fainting due to a decrease of blood pressure. Some people, especially heavily muscled men, send so much blood to their muscles in preparation to fight that when they don’t do some vigorous activity immediately, to keep the blood moving, their brain doesn’t have enough blood and they faint. It can be dangerous because while in this unusual condition the body can shut down and the vasovagal shock reflex may cause death. This overreaction is triggered in some people by medical procedures and is called trypanophobia.

The cause of fainting in these situations is because the person is told to relax, and they obey. When they do so, their excessively rapid heart rate slows down, their heightened blood pressure drops, and since so much of their blood is already in their muscles, and so little in their brain, they faint. The easy cure for fainting when getting needled is, just before and while the critical events are taking place, to tighten the abdomen repeatedly. Therefore, the medical profession should be trained to say:

If you feel anxious or weak, tighten your abdominal muscles repeatedly.

The key leverage points for a healthy future humanity

Tags

Long term human survival, Weapons of extermination, WOEs

When I look thousands and millions of years into the human future many of our present problems evaporate. The present worry about oil, coal and other one time use mineral consumptions become meaningless even in the thousand-year time frame. The assumption is of course that humanity survives and since dumb animals have survived without any preparations previous extinction events it is likely that humans will survive much worse problems. If we live as wild primitive hunters and the world isn’t totally degraded then a million years is possible. But, of course we don’t want to live as primitive survivalist we want to live as technologically super advanced creatures as near as possible to ecstatic perfection.

The question becomes, what must we do to achieve a world society of permanent social perfection? One thing which is absolutely obvious, is that humanity can not survive for a million years with huge numbers of Weapons Of Extermination (WOEs) available to large numbers of mutually hostile people. When critical things like food or power are in limited supply it will be impossible to avoid armed conflict.

Therefore, the WOEs must be totally eliminated from human availability, and to keep them eliminated for a really long period of time all people who seek them will be permanently isolated, and essentially terminated themselves. This is excessively harsh for our modern world and modern values, but I am talking about a really long period of time where even a small risk is unacceptable. Unfortunately, the risk at present isn’t small. No one can really offer an accurate estimate but my guess, but taking into account some 65 years of atomic weapons availability, and counting the number of near catastrophes, about six major known ones, like the Cuba Missile Crisis, the risk of Doomsday happening per year is about 3 percent. That makes it not too much of a worry on a daily or even a yearly basis but over a ten-year period it becomes  more like 30 percent and that should really be scary for every young person. Even if the risk were only one percent, which is probably unduly optimistic a young person is likely to experience a major catastrophe. A one percent per year over a thousand-year period of civilization (only one tenth of civilization) makes repeated events of this type almost inevitable. So, in the long run humanity must accept some new rules of behavior or go back to post Apocalypse situation which is a very primitive life style without any perks of modern life.

Okay, I am not so sure about a one world government at the moment, but after a Doomsday war or two or three or more where more than half of all humans get killed then I suspect most people would be willing to consider some invasion of their personal privacy and space, in order to prevent it happening again. Since the ability to make human WOEs will come into common knowledge on the internet in the next few years, assuming it there isn’t already, then there will need to be some method of removing it and monitoring every persons access to even the possibility of creating these things. Ug. This may get worse that the air terminal searches, but perhaps not, because once these things are forgotten it will only require preventing certain very specific things from coming into existence. The physical materials, and the knowledge and the equipment for putting WOEs together.

The motivation for some people to exterminate humanity will always be with us and Doomsday might be triggered intentionally by a suicidal terrorist. This option must be totally eliminated if a high-tech humanity is to survive, even for a thousand years. It is impossible to please all the people all the time, therefore all people must be prevented from even the possibility of creating WOEs. And, that may be possible.

There must be an abundance of the necessities of life for everyone. If some essential is missing there will be deadly conflict, and therefore necessities must be readily available to everyone all the time. There must never be even a suspicion that there might be a shortage of some life-sustaining necessity. That condition can only be obtained if there are fewer people than there is food, shelter, legal security of person and property and all of the similar basics.

These basic things can only be had in the long run if every person is known and monitored. Actually, in modern societies we are already monitored quite a bit and the additional things I am concerned with are family size and access to WOEs. If the total number of people is well within the Earth’s ability to sustain us and we have no access to really terrible weapons there is a chance for humanity to survive for a very long time.

If we control family size and access to WOEs humanity might survive.

A new possibility for extending your healthy life.

Tags

Blood pressure, Cardiovascular disease, Dissolving plaque, Heart attack

Cardiovascular diseases is the #1 cause of death and this post explores a potential cure. I offer a new possibility for extending your healthy life but I must caution you that it is speculation. 

Causes of Death from Wikipedia

 

Observe in the chart above that cardiovascular diseases grow more frequent with age and that cancer death decrease significantly after age 74. Apparently if a human body knows how to fight off cancer it does so and it becomes less of a threat in old age but cardiovascular disease is an accumulation of weakening injuries which build up and interact synergisticly until the body fails. Since the various forms of ischaemia are going to be the most probable cause for your death it is a subject with which you should become familiar. With knowledge of the problems related to ischaemia it becomes easier for you obey the well-known suggestions for improving your chances to live a long and healthy life.  

The new idea I wish to propose in this post is the possibility of eliminating the usual cause of ischaemia — the build up of plaque on the lining of arteries. That plaque limits the quantity of blood than can flow through the arteries to whatever organs are down stream. When the flow becomes limited the effected organ becomes less effective which in turn degrades the overall functioning of the whole body — that’s the synergism. When any given organ drops below some critical level, say 50% to 10% of normal functioning a crisis ensues. If it is the heart which is deprived of blood it is called a heart attack, of the brain it’s called ischemic stroke and so on for the other vital organs. Occasionally, but all too often a chunk of plaque breaks off the artery wall and floats down stream to a narrowed constriction, caused by a buildup of plaque, which this new piece then blocks. When that happens there is an acute event such as a sudden heart attack which causes total failure of that organ and when that organ fails the whole body dies.  

There have been some drugs on the market which claim to dissolve the plaque lining the blood vessels which if true and they are effective will lengthen the life expectancy of those lucky people taking them. But the patient must already have some clear indicators of need for these drugs before the doctors will prescribe them. What I may have discovered is an easy way that anyone can use for dissolving their plaque. I have been doing this procedure for two years now and reporting it at this time because today I got my annual medical exam and my blood pressure was measured on high-tech equipment by an experienced middle-aged nurse as 120/58 at 61 bpm. That is about as perfect as it gets for a 75-year-old male. So, what’s my procedure?  

When I have a cold — I had two this winter — I take a hot bath and raise my body temperature to 102°F. See my blog — A cure for the common cold using 105° F baths, — where I give the basic procedure I use for coping with my colds. The new information presented here is what I was doing after reaching my goal temperature. It was to drink a shot of 2.4 ounces of whisky or vodka. That isn’t enough to get much of a mental effect but if there is no food in the stomach it does give a sudden build up of alcohol in the arteries which, I think, is enough to flush them out. The idea is that the plaque is a fatty deposit and at the higher than normal body temperature it is more soluable and thus more available to what ever process the body usually uses to eliminate those fats. Since my flu fighting procedure is to do two hot baths per day for three days and then one a day for a several more days I get about eight alcohol induced artery flushings. That is more alcohol than I usually drink but I was considering it as medicine and for a good cause.  My proof of good effect is very scanty, a great medical exam, but it seemed significant. 

Like I said at the beginning, this is a speculative idea but the risk is minimal and the potential rewards are very great so I thought it worth passing on to you.

Give your friends a healthy elbow greeting.

Tags

Elbow bump greeting, Preventing H1N1, Saving your friends lives

The conventinal handshake spreads germs and with H1N1 virus now rampant it means spreading death. So far there hasn’t been many deaths because for some unknown reason the H1N1 has been quite mild in its human morbidity as a flu virus. But, if the 1918 epidemic, now called a pandemic, is any indication it might just turn deadly. I have made many suggestions in this blog on how this new pandemic might be slowed in its spread because it has generally been acknowledged that in the past slowing the transmission of a flu reduces its severity. When the entire human species is being considered then slowing the transmission rate even a little means enormous amounts of human suffering being avoided and perhaps millions of human lives being saved.

Vaccines are now being manufactured and distributed but this is taking time and it will be months before enough vaccine will have been manufactured so that everyone who wants a shot can get one. The people with the greatest need will receive the first batch of shots available. This of course means the politicians will get the new vaccine first because our modern world has a greater need for politicians than any other category of people. They were the ones most responsible for the slowness of response in manufacturing the flu vaccine and they are the ones responsible for the  continuing slowness of response in spreading the word on how to best combat the flu. Therefore it is only reasonable that the politicians should receive the very first samples of vaccine as they become available because we need their continued leadership in what needs to be done and how best to do it. (For those readers too dense to recognize satire I must say that the former statement was satire. Perfectly true statements but satire all the same.)

Here are my previous posts on flu:

1. NEJM makes the flu policy confusion worse – review.
2. Surviving the Swine-flu, Bird-flu. 4 new ways.
3. Mexican flu, bird-flu, swine-flu human-flu deadly flu.
4. Bird flu is coming sooner or later—so prepare for it.
5. Some obvious flu preparations: masks on airplanes.
6. A cure for the bird-flu ! ? Probaway – Life Hacks.
7. Lifehaven – What to do about usual disasters and terrorism?
8. How you can cure H1N1 flu — maybe.
9. Cure The Common Cold Using Voluntary 102° F Fevers. 

This new suggestion is so easy to do that everyone can soon learn to do it and it doesn’t require the instantaneous act of remembering just before you sneeze. Sneeze in you left sleeve and scratch your facial itches with right one is a fine idea but it requires some practice to become proficient because in general ones automatic bodily responses have taken over in the seconds just before one sneezes or scratches ones nose. My new proposal is easier because it will work effectively if either party to a greeting remembers the simple act of bumping elbows. The simple act of avoiding a handshake would be effective for slowing transmission of flu germs from one person to another. Simply replacing the usual hand shake, which spreads germs quickly with a gentle bumping of the outer edge of the elbows which doesn’t spread germs because one never touches the outside of ones elbow to the face. It is the mouth, nose and eyes where the flu germs gain entry to the body. 

The sneeze in the sleeve helps prevent airborn transmission of flu germs but it contaminates the inside of the sleeve but it was to the inside of the elbow and the hello bump is done with the outside of the elbow so that even if their was a sneeze earlier it was in a different place than the place being touched between friends at the greeting point. Also, the point of contact never touches the face. The suggested procedure prevents sneezed germs from going into the air where they might be inhaled, prevents the germs from being transferred with a handshake greeting and prevents germs from being transmitted from one’s own body to one’s own face. Each of these simple things slows down the spread of virus’s.

There are still virus germs in the air but it usually takes a large number of them to overwhelm the body’s infection fighting defences. The simple elbow bump greeting will lower the risk of reaching the critical number of virus’s and thus prevent sickness.

The elbow bump could become just as affectionate as a hand shake currently is and in some ways it would be friendlier because there isn’t a possibility of transmitting disease or some overly aggressive gripper hurting your hand, or gripping too long which is socially unpleasant.

The custom of mouth to mouth kissing between strangers as a greeting obviously transmits virus and should be avoided. Flu is a social disease and like gonorrhea is easily prevented by avoiding physical contact.

People expect to live forever—in perfect health.

Tags

Limits of reasonable behavior, Live forever, Public smoking, Smoking caused cancer

People shouldn’t get a swine flu shot because one person in a million might get a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) according to a news report today in MAIL_Online. Hilary Wilkinson didn’t die from the flu, she didn’t even catch it, but she did get very sick with GBS possibly from a recent flu shot.

As you can see see from this photograph she is okay now after being treated with immunoglobulin, another product of the modern high tech industry. It appears that now people expect to live forever—in perfect health—and if they get sick with a relatively safe procedure which might prevent a far worse thing from happening to them and infecting those around them, they feel it’s their right to sue for millions. Using this line of reasoning it seems that if a person gets a disease of any sort whatsoever, it is some other person’s fault and they should sue—someone, anyone. If a person now gets lung cancer they can now sue someone who smoked a cigarette in their presence twenty years ago or perhaps they might sue someone who smoked a cigarette in Antarctica fifty years ago. Where’s the limit?

When it comes to emerging flues such as the A-H1N1 flu, eventually everyone will have to develop personal antibodies to resist that infection. The vaccine which helps a person develop those antibodies is a much to be welcomed gift of modern science. The vaccine shot reduces the severity of that type of flu when you eventually do get it because your bodies immune system will have been mildly challenged and learned to resist that particular flu. The new H1N1 flu will probably be around for decades until another flu comes along to displace it. In the mean time the whole human population will have to develop antibodies to this now prevalent A-H1N1 virus.

Typically a new strain of flu lasts for several decades and during those decades people will get about one flu per year on average, thus on average the person will get sick with this flu, or a very similar one, about twenty times. Usually it is the first time someone gets sick with a new strain of flu that they suffer the most. It is when a new flu is first going pandemic that it is the most dangerous and kills the most people. As the years roll by and a person has been exposed to a particular flu several times, their body is better able to cope with it. They will still get sick occasionally, just not as sick.

People born before 1958 will probably have a bit of residual resistance to the A-H1N1 strain because they have already had it, or something very similar but because those people are now old their overall health and resistance has declined. So the very old people among them are at high risk and many will die from this new flu. People born after 1958 are at higher risk also but for different reasons. The very young because they haven’t developed much resistance to any diseases of the world. And, the healthy adults, if this A-H1N1 follows the pattern of the pandemic of 1918 the healthy young people will die proportionately greater numbers than would be expected and these are the people for whom the vaccine would probably save the most lives especially as measured by productive potential. They are not the ones who are being scheduled to get the first round of the new vaccine however, unless they are already sick from some other cause.

At present a good strategy for an average person would be to get a vaccination as soon as possible and then watch very carefully for GBS symptoms and if symptoms do appear to get to a doctor instantly for an immunoglobulin shot. If that is done there is little chance of the GBS getting serious or of dieing from the flu. When giving shots it would be appropriate for the nurse to give a flyer to the recipient with GBS symptoms and who to contact if those symptoms appear.

Some earlier blogs on flu:

NEJM makes the flu policy confusion worse – review
Surviving the Swine-flu, Bird-flu. 4 new ways.
Mexican flu, bird-flu, swine-flu human-flu deadly flu.
Bird flu is coming sooner or later—so prepare for it.

A Wellbeing Scale for measuring healthy behavior.

Tags

Enjoying life, good habits, Healthy behavior, How to live, How to live better, Measuring health, Risky behavior, Scale of Health, Self improvement, Wellbeing

We all do a lot of thinking and working which isn’t necessarily helping us to maximize our happiness and well-being. The Happiness Scale shows a direction to go for improving your behavior and maximizing your total happiness from any behavioral place you happen to find yourself. Well-being is a bit different from happiness, because it emphasizes more the physical condition of people rather than the mental and behavioral states. The various Probaway blogs on the subjects of Lifehavens and the Earth Ark are an attempt to maximize the physical genetic survival of humans, and other existing life forms. That is the extreme example of wellbeing,but some more mundane habits are needed for daily use. The Happiness Scale is similar and makes a good point of departure for creating a parallel scale and it might be called a Wellbeing Scale.

Scaled~# – Explanatory sentence

WELL~0 Intentional suicidal acts intended to destroy one’s physical being.

WELL~1 Reveling in personal extreme risk, and the enjoyment of violating other people’s natural rights.

WELL~2 Seeking out known hazards to health and wellbeing, for rebellion and quick unearned pleasures.

WELL~3 Conforming to some legally accepted standards of behavior, but which are known to be unhealthy.

WELL~4 Excessively doing something which is generally healthful, but the excess creates problems.

WELL~5 Living with other people in the generally accepted ways of cleanliness, and routine behavior.

WELL~6 Healthy living is achieved, and being maintained by careful exclusion of non-appropriate things.

WELL~7 Superior life is attained by careful virtuous behavior aimed at developing a personal ideal.

WELL~8 Setting examples of life enhancing behavior which can be followed by others.

WELL~9 Constructing a local environment within which everyone can flourish.

WELL~10 Overseeing the public environment which helps everyone to be healthy and productive.

WELL~11 Dedicated efforts to find new and better ways for enhancing health and wellbeing of everything.

WELL~12 Enhancing the genetic life force in all creatures to maximize their potential for healthy individual life.

WELL~13 Creating new life forms which will better utilize the energy provided by natural energy sources.

WELL~14 Physical perfection is being manifest, and is encoded for all time and all inhabitable places in reliably recreatable forms.

The ancient Greeks thought that happiness was an achievement but most modern people have associated it with short-term pleasure. This chart has emphasized that ancient interest in the long-term aspects of human vitality so the impact of a person’s actions are set into a more historical perspective. The issues that matter most are issues about living our human lives in the most vital way possible and not about momentary feelings or desires.

That quote is from the comments section under the Probaway – Happiness Scale from which this Wellbeing Scale was derived.

---

NEJM – Shattuck Lecture – Health of the Nation

Tags

babies, genetic disorder, Health, NEJM, New England Journal of Medicine, Shattuck Lecture

The New England Journal of Medicine publishes an overview medical article every year entitled the Shattuck Lecture. This year they featured a seminar discussion with 13 panelists from a variety of policy level positions, including medicine, academic, business, insurance and politics. This seminar will have a major impact on US governmental policy because it comes from the most prestigious medical journal in the country. The magazine article was unfortunately too short to give any of the various participants enough time and space to develop their positions properly, and the published article becomes little more than a collection of paragraph long outlines of complex problems with little offered in the way of workable solutions. After several pages of these very brief presentations the concluding page was a simple off-loading the problem onto the presidential candidates. However, after dumping the problem onto the candidates their published conclusion about the candidates stated plans were, “Part of it is fantasy based on a lack of understanding about how things really work now. We will have to wait till after the election—see how things settle out. And then engage in a realistic discussion about how to pick this up together.” The United States government turns to these “experts” for their expert advice, and what they got from them was not well presented suggestions, but this kind of worthless buck passing. Bah humbug.

This panel was supposed to make recommendations on “The Health Of The Nation”, and because they were dealing with that enormous abstract issue one would expect them to cope with it from a grand, and abstract point of view—from the long term health of the people. But, they didn’t do that. Instead they were trying to cope with a nation of 300 million people with a life (a political life of 232 years since its birth) on a personal short term basis of doctors being paid. It was on a four year election cycle basis at most. This panel may have been filled with experts in their various fields, but they certainly didn’t approach their stated goal properly because the health of the nation is not a four year issue it is much grander issue.

There is a fundamental problem underlying these peoples approach, and it is a problem which compounds the practice of morality with the practice of democracy. This problem has been recognized since the beginnings of the idea of democracy, by the early Greek philosophers, and that is that it tends to be very short sighted. Democracy is founded upon an ideal of giving the people the right to determine their destiny which is an excellent idea, but what happens in practice is that the ideas which dominate the public’s attention are presented to the controlling majority of the people in the moment of decision as the short term moral thing to do. Thus a democratic country becomes very susceptible to complex problems being reduced to eloquent catch phrases, slogans, and pretty faces presenting moral sounding platitudes. What leadership is forced to do if it wants to stay in power, and be successful is to present ideas which sound beautiful now, and which permit a behavior which can be defended with beautiful rhetoric at the next election in the same momentarily beautiful way. This Shattuck Lecture had the stated intent of trying to take a more objective, and longer point of view on the health of the whole nation, but it avoided this by its shifting the long term thinking and responsibility onto the totally overbooked candidates, who have many other responsibilities. These policy researchers and presenters did our country a great disservice by not delving deeper into the issue.

Because the Shattuck Lecture was so very shallow in its time perception it didn’t even remotely come close to the fundamental long term health care problem of our 232 year old country. The problem about to be broached here never enters public discussion, because it has no visible effect in four years, but in 232 years more it will have a vast and perhaps overwhelming impact. It may have impacts greater than all other health disasters combined that occur in that long period of time. The problem is that the very success of our current medical establishment has a negative impact upon our nations genetic health.

In a natural situation in which all wild species live, and in which all humans lived up until the advent of modern medicine, about one hundred years ago, most births did not result in individuals which themselves reproduced. Today because of high quality medical care virtually all births result in individuals that reach sexual maturity, and are capable of reproduction. That is wonderful in the short run, but in the long run it is not so good because of the introduction of health destroying genetic disorders. The long run is only one hundred years and certainly far less than 232 year life of our country. That number of years is chosen to give some time perspective to this problem. Assuming a generation to be twenty years there would be eleven generations in that time period. Our country has lived that long, and we should do what we can to see that it lives in good health that much longer.

Here is the problem: approximately six percent of babies born in the US have visible birth defects, and the number of invisible defects makes the total number of defects greater. Some of this disorder is heritable, and is passed on to these individuals’ children, who in twenty years pass it on to their children, and so on for eleven generations in this example. After that period the number of people affected with the disorder would be enormous. A simple multiple by 2 with each generation reaches  2048 by the end of that time. That is sad enough, but that genetic problem is derived from a single individual. The medical disaster being currently created by our medical establishment is far worse than a simple compound interest type of problem because of the other babies being born into this current six percent with other heritable problems. These will compound at a similar rate, and they will interbreed with all of the others with problems, and thus there will soon be babies born with multiple defects which in their turn will be passed to their children. In a natural situation these are cleared out of the gene pool by natural selection.

Because modern medicine has been so very successful there has been no way to remove these unfortunate genes from the group’s gene pool, and so it grows. In a single generation the problem is invisible; even in two or three it doesn’t become visible because who remembers how things were sixty years ago at a time when they were twenty years old, and just might have become aware of birth defects. Sixty years ago infectious disease, and communicable disease and war were far more visible health problems. This gene defect is an abstract problem, and is not visible without a very long time sense, but in time periods of one hundred years or so it becomes visible and in two hundred years it will become devastating to the whole country. There is the hope that genetic engineering can eliminate genetic disorders although dealing with 6.7 billion individuals on a high tech genetic basis seems unlikely when at present it is difficult to find enough money to put up mosquito netting in bedrooms of malaria infected countries, and even that is being paid for with outside foreign charity.

NEJM – Genomic Medicine cover

The Shattuck Lecture probably wouldn’t have admitted onto their panel a person who discussed long term genetic health even though it fitted in perfectly with the stated goal of “Health of the Nation” because it would be seen as admitting to the value of eugenics, and that has been an anathema subject for seventy years. Ultimately the panels short sighted, even microscopic sighted policy making will bring disaster to humanity unless the likes of Craig Venter, and his genetic engineers can find a solution. He and his co-researchers should be supported in every way possible in their quest for a better world. However, his struggle has been a terrible one against the powers that be in Washington on the Human Genome project, and so far not much better on the other projects he has for saving humanity. Cleaning up the gene pool of heritable disease should be at the top of the agenda on National Health. The ancient pre-human women who set humanity upon the healthy path to intelligence and morality a hundred thousand years ago were far more sensible than the high minded, highly credentialed and highly paid people of the Shattuck Lecture.

One hundred million healthy people is probably ideal.

Tags

birth control, maximum population, population, population control, world population

What is the ideal population of the Earth? The answer to that question by natural processes would be, “The greatest number that can be created”. Nature maximizes the number of any given species by creating as many offspring as possible, and lets natural processes prune off the excess. This is an ongoing process, and works out quite well, because it adapts all living species to cope with the environments in which they are attempting to live. On a daily basis nature seems peaceful enough, because things have evolved to be stabilizing, and when one thing is overabundant there are processes which soon bring it back into balance with its environment. When the environment is very complex with many species vying for a livelihood in the same area there are many factors functioning to keep all of those species pushed into their personal niche. In this complex situation there are many unpredictable variables, such as weather, which occur all of the time, and some of them are extreme. Overall the complex bio-habitat adapts quickly, and when the more usual situation for an area reasserts itself the most common form of the various species reassert themselves.

This process has worked well for maintaining stability of the vast number of species which have inhabited the Earth — up until the appearance of modern Homo sapiens. It worked pretty well even then, up until the industrial revolution started becoming effective at mining the minerals that are buried in the earth, about 1825. At first the problem was just the fossil fuels, but now it includes other things such as fossil water, and atmospheric fossil air. By fossil air is meant our current supply of gases above the surface of the Earth with the implication that it is a leftover from earlier geological processes that created minerals such as fossil coal, and fossil water. Fossil air may turn out to be the most dangerous thing of all to mine, because as it is depleted it affects everyone in a bad way, and there are no reasonable alternatives. The destruction of fossil air is a bit different from polluting the air because some of the pollution can be removed by natural processes over a long number of years but for example the locking up of oxygen into unusable compounds like CO2 just deprives us of that essential oxygen which is needed for life.

Now, with the development of atomic energy there is an appalling ability to contaminate the environment. This pollution can move through the water, but it appears most troublesome when it moves through the air because then it can go everywhere. If the only use of the atomic processes was to create energy for electricity there might be a slim chance to contain the radioactive pollutants. However, in the long run there will be atomic wars, and when that happens there will be radioactive pollution everywhere there is atmosphere, and that is everywhere where people live. But, it is argued, we need the energy and the minerals to feed all of our people. Of course we do, but if we had a smaller population then the demands upon the Earth would be proportionally smaller. The question becomes how much smaller would the population have to be to be permanently sustainable at a desirable level. Once that number is determined then there can be processes devised for maintaining that population, and once that is stable it might be possible for humans to live very comfortably for a very long time. Millions of years perhaps.

The last time humans were in balance with the Earth was in 1825 with a population of a  billion farmers, but now with our much more demanding lifestyle using ten times as much energy it would only be possible for the earth to sustain one tenth as many people. That is how the number one hundred million is arrived at as a postulated goal for human population. If methods were developed for sustaining a higher population that would be wonderful, but until that is done the population is going to have to drop back to the smaller number.

Various religious groups are the staunchest foes of population control, but this condemns humanity to an early extinction, and one certainly hopes that that is not their goal. Back two thousand years ago when Jesus was active, there were about one hundred million people, and one doesn’t hear much complaining about there not being enough people. So it seems not unreasonable to ask the church to return to that population number. If the current policy of maximizing population in a Darwinian fashion is maintained, early extinction is certainly at hand, and no sane person wants that. Jesus said his primary goal was that the people might have life and that they might have it more abundantly. John 10:10 “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” Notice that the statement is that the living people might have this more abundant life, and it was not a statement that there should be more people in any numerical sense. King James Bible Genesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. and Genesis 9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. Genesis 9:7 “As for you, be fruitful and multiply; Populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it.” All of these commandments by God were at a time when the population had been reduced to those very few people, and creatures who had been in Noah’s ark. By last count there are some six point seven billion more people now, and one would suspect even the most grandiose biblical prophets would be astonished at our numbers. At that ancient time they needed to fill up the land, but now that the land is overfull it is time to consider maintenance.

For those ancient folks their talk of destruction concerned such local phenomena as earthquakes, fires, floods, and such things, and only those with the most hallucinogenic dreams could imagine the real powers which we actually possess. We possess some of those powers just sitting at our computers. Our talking to people on the other side of the planet or scooping up and analyzing dirt on Mars would be pure hallucination to those people.

This blog was intended to be a plea for reducing population, and after a bit of introduction, aimed at arguments which might have some tiny influence on church people. But, I have wandered, and failed miserably. The arguments are weak. Not because the need is weak, but because there really is no rational way to approach irrational people with reason. Matthew 13:15 For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

The time is rotten for Doomsday!